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The problems with education in Australia are not new. When the first major Commonwealth government report on school quality (the ‘Karmel report) was published in 1985, there was no testing program for literacy and numeracy but employers were of the view that the basic skill levels of many school leavers were low. The first government literacy and numeracy tests were introduced in NSW in 1989 and thanks to national and international assessments introduced in the past two decades, there has been objective evidence for decades now that an unacceptable number of students are struggling with these fundamental aspects of education. Above the basic level, achievement is mediocre by international standards and has been declining. Fewer students are taking the harder maths and science subjects in senior secondary school. There are concerns that the reading and writing competency of many university students is affecting their ability to achieve academically at this level. These things are all connected and known.

As greater consensus has been reached about how to teach children to decode and read words fluently, the focus of discussion among practitioners and researchers has shifted to reading comprehension. Some of this discussion has centred on the utility of teaching comprehension skills and strategies explicitly as awareness of the central role of background knowledge in reading comprehension has grown (Smith et al., 2021). The arguments against teaching comprehension skills and strategies are often framed in these ways:

In September, the Productivity Commission released an Interim Report from its Inquiry into the National School Reform Agreement (NSRA). The NSRA is “a joint agreement between the Commonwealth, states and territories to lift student outcomes across Australian schools. The NSRA outlines a set of strategic reforms in areas where national collaboration will have the greatest impact, builds on current national reform efforts, complements state and territory leadership and supports local implementation. Ongoing implementation of these shared commitments remains a condition of funding under the Australian Education Act 2013 (Cth) (Act).” (p. iv)

Well before the sparkling new Australian Curriculum 9.0 endorsed replacing predictable texts with decodable texts in early years classrooms, demand had begun to grow for decodable books.

When the draft of the revised Australian Curriculum was released for consultation last year, the response was swift and emphatic from hundreds of reading scientists and well-informed educators and parents familiar with the scientific evidence on reading and literacy. They were dismayed that the draft curriculum did not reflect the accumulated evidence on reading and writing that has been published and disseminated over the past thirty years or more. Instead, the draft curriculum retained content that endorsed out-dated approaches to literacy teaching, based on the now disproven whole language methods that are to blame for thousands of students leaving school without adequate literacy skills. To their credit, the federal and state education ministers agreed with this assessment and instructed ACARA to take note.

The Next Steps report prepared by the Quality Initial Teacher Education review panel was finally released last week after a three month wait. It hits the mark nicely in many respects. It covers some familiar territory: the status of the teaching profession, attracting highly capable candidates, better practical placements as part of ITE, and improved early career experience. These things are no less important than they have ever been and need ongoing attention and improvement.

The contribution of background or content knowledge to reading comprehension is becoming better understood (see for example, here, here, here, and here) and there are long-standing concerns about persistent differences in literacy levels among rural and metro students, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous students.

People sometimes raise the question of when the optimal time is for children to begin to learn to read. This is especially relevant for parents of children who are home schooled, or who attend schools where the preference is to start reading instruction later (such as Steiner schools), but it is also an interesting question to address more generally.

The book Clarity: What matters most in learning, teaching, and leading (Sharratt, 2019) is on the desks of many principals around Australia and elswhere in the world. It is a recommended text for leaders in a number of school systems. Published and sold by the Australian College of Educational Leaders, and with a foreword by John Hattie, one might reasonably assume that its contents and advice are based on rigorous research evidence. Author Lyn Sharratt is herself an advocate for the use of data to inform teaching practice.

Research that informs our collective understanding of literacy development is not conducted within one field of science. This is tricky, because it means that researchers working in different areas aren’t necessarily speaking the same language. As such, it’s not always obvious how various strands of evidence are woven together to form a coherent picture of the ‘science of reading’.